Sunday, February 27, 2005

SBS 2003 Server running smoothy now

The only real issue I have had with the SBS server (after being very frustrated through the month or so of working it out) is to do with the SBS server backup (included in the server management).

The first problem I had was it was extremely slow (I was backing up to a shared network drive on another machine) It was using 2% of the NIC capacity. A upgrade of the motherboard driver partially fixed this. I then installed a gigabit NIC (Realtek RTL8169S-32 chipset). This improved performance noticeably.
However it was still very slow compared with other backups I was running from WIN XP machines to the same machines shared drive.
The next major problem was that the server would freeze after running the backup. The backup was complete and the file was verified, but the server would not complete the scheduled task or mark it completed in the backup log. I checked the backup file and I could restore from it so I had no idea why this was occuring. I checked with Susan the SBS Diva. She suggested a hotfix from Microsoft. I installed this and it worked perfectly - the first time. From then on straight back to freezing every time it ran the backup.
I eventually gave up. I disabled the backup completely. I then set up a backup from another machine, selecting all the shared drives on the server and then remotely backing them up. It runs 2-3 times as fast, performs without a flaw and the server hasn't crashed since!
End result - the SBS 2003 backup program has to be buggy. Its crap even when it does work (performance wise). Server is stable without it. Go figure.


Posted by: Jethro | 10:05 PM |